Sunday, January 10, 2010

The Mage Of Winds

If you don’t like the poem so much the way it is written, then try reversing the voices. Don’t say, “You are a wizard”, say “I am a wizard.” And so on. It is easily done and works just fine until right at the end. But I am not the Mage of Winds. I am the Man of the Northern Wall. This Mage was my first teacher.

The Mage Of Winds

You are a wizard,a mage of winds, of the wand.When you stand uprightyour bones are revealed as dark emerald. You warnedme I would see this before you stood up.Now you tell me fire blooms ina cave in the airbehind you, secret,not available to anybut you and the wind.You say poets mightknow what you mean when you saysuch things. I wonder.

The View From The Northern Wall

Some years ago my poetry took on a mythic flavor and I became a character in my own poems, a mage, "the man of the Northern Wall". This apellation is not completely fictional. My middle name is Noordwal, a Dutch term for north wall, though in current Dutch it mainly means north bank as in riverbank. I was told that an ancestor, a Portugese Jew escaping the Inquisition, settled in a small Dutch town and took this name from where he settled, near the north wall of the town. I have thought for a long time that -wal meant wall, think my mother told me that. A linguist might say that my usage is no longer common, is an older usage, but then the Inquisition happened in Portugal a few centuries ago, right around the time the Moors lost control of the Iberian Peninsula and the Jews lost the modest protection given them by Islam. Now I write as this mage, my poetry persona.